New York Public Library's Books of the Century

Many of the great dystopic novels of this Century--George Orwell's 1984
(review) and Animal Farm (review),
A
Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (review),
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (review),
Ayn Rand's Anthem (review)--are still as timely
and pertinent today as they were on the day they were written. Their
endurance is a result of the eternal and universal theme that each of them
addresses: the fundamental human conflict between the desire for security
and the aspiration for freedom. On the other hand, Margaret Atwood's
feminist take on dystopia, while still an interesting and entertaining
read, now feels dated and parochial. It is essentially just an expression
of liberal fear of Ronald Reagan in the early 1980's; its concerns
are too limited, temporary and, ultimately, misguided.

Atwood posits a future Republic of Gilead run by a conservative Christian
dictatorship. As a result of exposure to chemicals, nuclear waste
and other pollutants, female fertility rates have fallen to catastrophically
low levels, so the government forces fertile women to go to reeducation
camps. There they are trained as handmaidens, sexual surrogates for
powerful men with infertile wives. Infertile women are sent to clean
up toxic wastes or are trained as Marthas, household servants. Female
sexuality is completely forbidden, indeed most sexual expression that does
not serve the Republic's purposes, including pornography, homosexuality,
etc., is banned; sex is permitted for reproductive purposes only.

The novel tells the story of a handmaiden named Offred (she is intended
to bear the children "of Fred", a Gileadan General). The General
though sees her as more than simply a surrogate. He gives her
gifts, plays forbidden word games with her and eventually takes her to
an underground nightclub where officials can treat women as sexual beings.
The General's wife, Serena Joy, is naturally jealous of Offred, even without
knowing about the special attention that the General is giving her, but
she is desperate for a child so, when Offred fails to become pregnant,
Serena Joy arranges for her to sleep with the chauffeur. Offred becomes
pregnant and finds some happiness with her new lover, but when Serena Joy
finds the cocktail dress that the General gave her for their nightclub
trip, she denounces Offred to the authorities. A van comes to carry
Offred away to her certain death, but she realizes that it is actually
manned by rebels who will spirit her to safety.

We'll cut Atwood some slack on the sheer silliness of the pollution
subtext. Recall the hysteria of the Environmental movement when Reagan
was elected and essentially staffed the EPA, Interior and other key positions
with crooks and industry shills. What with Three Mile Island, Love
Canal, the Cayuhoga burning, Bhopal, Nuclear Winter scenarios, etc., the
Left was still deeply in thrall to Rachel Carsonesque visions of Silent
Springs and the like. That Atwood fell prey to these lunatic concerns
is regrettable, but understandable given the times.

Less excusable is her fundamental misreading of the gender politics
of abortion and reproduction. The great irony of abortion is, of
course, that, largely due to historical circumstances, each gender
is temporarily on the wrong side of the issue. Abortion happens to
have become technically feasible and safe at just the moment in history
when women are asserting their political power. And there is no more
profound assertion of power than the ability to wield life and death over
fellow beings. Political institutions actually came into being in
the first instance in order to secure individuals from the threat of death
at the hands of the powerful. The state's ultimate power is expressed
in death-dealing, both war and capital punishment. Given this perspective,
it is not surprising that newly assertive womankind should have seized
upon, and should so zealously guard, a right to kill as the central expression
of their newly granted powers. Conversely, men, threatened by this
naked and brutal display of the new feminine power, took up a largely reactionary
position in opposition to its exercise. However, the natural
positions of the respective genders on this subject are actually the exact
opposite of these current stances.

The two competing forces in human affairs are, as mentioned above, security
vs. freedom, and they are largely, though not exclusively, gender derived.
Left to our their own devices for thousands of years, men were the dominant
gender and oppressed women to one degree or another. It is, therefore,
only natural that women as a broad class focus on gaining security; security
from violence, poverty, hunger, etc.. Meanwhile, men, for whom the
natural state of affairs was not too bad a deal, favor the greatest freedom
possible. There are, of course, exceptions to these general classifications.
For instance, men who lack confidence in their ability to compete in an
equal and free environment, or those who simply despise the people who
succeed in such an arrangement, have tended to favor security. Confident
and capable women, on the other hand, who believe in their own capacity,
and that of their fellow women, to thrive in an open contest, have supported
the cause of freedom. But, speaking in general terms, this gender
categorization is extremely useful when analyzing human history: men/freedom,
women/security.

Applying this conceptual dichotomy to the issue of abortion, it seems
obvious that the natural position of women should be one of opposition
to abortion, where men should support it. Indeed, the unintended
consequences of the era of abortion demonstrate why this has been such
a pyrrhic victory for womankind. In the first instance, men have
been virtually absolved of familial responsibilities, destroying one of
the historic fundaments of security for women. The explosion
in fatherless families and the surge in women and children living in poverty
are an inevitable consequence of the position that women are exclusively
responsible for child-bearing decisions. But there is an even more
insidious force at work that may prove truly disastrous for women in the
long run. It is an issue that is so politically explosive that it
is rarely ever addressed--gender based selection of fetuses. The
rise over the course of this century of the Social Welfare state in the
West and of authoritarian and totalitarian security states in the East
has been, by and large, the result of the enfranchisement of women.
It is a simple fact of life, or seemed to be for several millennia, that
there are more female births than male births, and men have shorter life
spans than women. Thus, women vastly outnumber men at any given time
in any given society and where elections decide power distribution, they
have a significant advantage.

Or at least this used to be the case. But now two female triumphs threaten
that very base of power. First, the gender based life span gap is
closing as women join, or are forced into, the workforce. Second,
the gender gap in births is closing or has been reversed wherever abortion
is generally available. In nations like China the numbers are truly
startling with as many as 750,000 more male births than female in some
years. These two trends portend the eventual arrival at a set of
circumstances that would enable men, even in democratic societies, to seize
back power and dismantle the institutional security structures (the welfare
net, the vast skein of government rules and regulations and the newly created
gender, sexual orientation, race, handicap, etc. based "rights") which
has arisen over the past 70 years to provide the losers in society with
a safety net when they prove unable to compete. It, therefore, seems
inevitable that over time the genders will reverse their current positions
and eventually it will be women who are prolife, in order to safeguard
their own security, and men who advocate abortion, as a means of securing
greater freedom for themselves.

What then are we to make of Atwood's imagined future where men are in
control of a society which is totally controlled and freedom is unknown?
This runs counter to the long arc of human history, which has seen men
struggle for ever increasing amounts of freedom, even to the point where
they liberated women and granted them the vote and access to the workplace,
despite the obvious threat this posed to freedom itself. Moreover,
the driving force behind this evolution towards freedom has come from Christianity.
The concepts of the infinite perfectibility of man and the capacity of
every individual to form a relationship with God, without any intermediary,
underpin both Democracy and Capitalism, which are essentially just the
political and economic expressions of these religious ideals. Therefore,
the rise of a Republic of Gilead strikes me as extremely counterintuitive.

More likely, and pleasantly honest on the author's part, is the collaboration
of women, as wives, Aunts, etc. in such a regime. The book would
really be more plausible if a matriarchy had arisen in this future and
imposed similar restrictions upon men. As it stands,
the book is a clarion call to fight a future that is pretty difficult to
imagine.

Virtually any story that portrays the tragic results that will follow
when men exchange freedom for security has something to recommend it.
But The Handmaid's Tale is most interesting as an artifact expressing
the hysterical concerns of the Left in the Reagan Era. It has simply
not withstood the test of even a brief time very well.

With all due respect, this article is highly inaccurate. The review has hijacked The Handmaid's Tale and used it to attack those in favour of abortion and 1980's ecologists.

The review implies that The Handmaid's Tale is largely about abortion or can be read as such: this is simply not the main, or even an important, theme in the novel at all. It is about the oppression of women and the methods used to do so, and challenges religious fundamentalists, military dictators and extreme feminists. Suggesting that The Handmaid's Tale is "about" abortion is like suggesting that 1984 is "about" living in England.

Furthermore, the environmental catastrophe used as background to the story is not necessarily a reflection of the fears of the 1980's Left: it is a method of creating the story's set-up, much like the atomic war mentioned in Brave New World. It doesn't matter overly where this came from (climate change? An escaped bioweapon? We are never actually told), just that it's there. As such, it cannot be seen as direct satire.

The review makes great mention of women being for security, men for freedom. I don't think this idea enters the book at all, and I'm sure Mrs Atwood would call it "patriarchal", or something like that. The only fully-developed male character is Commander Fred, who seems just as wretched a pawn of the system as the women, and while longing for freedom does so no more than Offred. I can't help but feel that the reviewer is stamping his own interpretation very heavily over the text, obscuring what was there to begin with.

This is a difficult book to review for some people, as it has the ability to touch religious and social nerves. (If it helps, it is worth remembering that the Republic of Gilead runs on a perversion of Christianity, just as the Nazi state ran on a perversion of German patriotism.) Reading this review, I can only conclude that the author has used this book as a starting-point to attack the American left, rather than providing a full review of its weaknesses and merits as a novel.

- Steerpike

- Aug-06-2006, 07:20

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Interesting. Perhaps the author of this article only skimmed the novel itself- it's shocking that a review of a book could be so factually inaccurate. (Where did he get the idea that wives were sterile? Oh, and btw? It's only alluded to that the Eyes at the end of the book where Mayday rebels. The beauty is that you don't know for sure.) Also interesting is how he used the context of the time when the book was written to argue against the book, when in actual fact I don't think it has much to do with it. Did he take into account that in China female foetus' are aborted much more than male foetus' because of childbirth laws? This is a clumsy, ill informed review that, whilst being articulate, is a literary joke.

- Maag

- Apr-17-2006, 11:16

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I personally enjoyed reading 'The Handmaid's Tale', despite it being overtly feminist. While Atwood sets the story in America, in the aftermath of a fundamentalist Christian uprising (well, the leaders insist that the regime is Christian), it was prophetic of the Taliban regime (and other oppressive Islamic interpretations) with regards to female and homosexual oppression/male dominance/execution and torture of dissenters etc.

However it does have quite a few plot holes and the male characters are 2-dimensional.

It has some very clever moments and does raise some interesting points (though few are new), but it's definitely not the best dystopian story. See 'Brave New World', '1984' etc.

- Woot

- Feb-06-2006, 13:36

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wow maybe u should consider reading books before thrashing them. while u make some good points ur knowledge of the plot is completely inaccurate. it is never stated that offred is pregnant but is stated that Serena Joy DID NOT turn her in. hard to believe what someone has to say about a book they seem to lack knowledge of. i suggest u do ur research before criticizing the greatness of a novel u could never acheive.

- ive actually read it

- Dec-31-2004, 00:17

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I forgot to mention, I am female. This is NOT great feminist fiction. I must admit, however, that I am no expert in these matters. So, perhaps it was a grand achievement for women???

- Anna (again)

- Oct-27-2004, 00:37

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Unlike the other commentors, I COMPLETELY [at least in regards to the book review; politics and such aside] agree with the reviewer. The HANDMAID'S TALE was, quite frankly, one of the dullest reading experiences, not evoking more than a drop of emotion. Until I read this book I thought it was impossible to create a character who /remembers/ a past of love, lust, and joys but simply and quite quickly submits to her new, passionless circumstances. Most disturbing, is that Offred has exremely passive reactions to everything. She has no metaphorical hunger, no thirst, no passion, no drive. She is utterly empty, indeed a womb and nothing more. Offred, a relatively well educated and deeply-in-love mother and wife becomes a grey spot in a grey wall - only seen if one approaches with a state-of-the-art high-resolution microscope.

In response to the comment re: the sterility of men not women: why have Martha's if the wives are perfectly capable of reproducing? What is the point of the Martha's? Why make the wives jealous? Let the wives have the sex. If you happen to have read the Bible, from which Atwood has modernized the idea of handmaids, the wife was sterile for some time so the husband employed the method of handmaids as explained in the book. Granted, the males were also perhaps sterile, suggested by the Commander's inability to impregnate Offred despite the number of times the two copulated, both formally and secretly. But, my main question is, what is the point of arguing that the male was sterile? Does this make THE HANDMAID'S TALE a masterpiece?

I highly suggest reading George Orwell's 1984. Now that is a true masterpiece. I cannot believe that THE HANDMAID'S TALE has been compared to such greatness.

- Anna

- Oct-27-2004, 00:33

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OK...She makes clear that this is a "reductio ad absurdum", a theoretical exercise designed to stimulate thought about social issues rather than a realistic portrait of a probable future. If you actually read the book, she does this by comparing herself to Jonathan Swift, who in A Modest Proposal highlighted the hard-heartedness of the English in allowing the Irish masses to starve by satirically proposing that they should be encouraged to eat their own children.

- David Martin

- Apr-19-2004, 18:31

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This was the most boorish and inaccurate article I've read in a while. If the reviewer had read the book correctly, or at all, he would have realized that the men were sterile, not the women. Also, the manipulative use of religion, evidenced by the men reading selections of the bible because of forced illiteracy of women, the pray machines and the continual use of Old Testament jargon, were far too feasible. This reviewer would rave about The Turner Diaries. Also, your odds of fathering a son improve greatly if conception occurs with the first ejaculation, so maybe he should bone up on his biology as well. It's odd, I'm just assuming a guy wrote this review.

- Daniel Springle

- Jul-15-2003, 16:15

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Prophetic? Cool! All I want from Christmas is a Handmaiden....

- OJ

- Apr-24-2003, 08:30

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This author of this review is extremely niave and takes it upon himself to think as little as possible upon the actual issues with which he seems to believe he is engaging himself. He should keep watching CNN where they continue to tell him what to think and stay out of academia. Though the plot of The Handmaidens Tale is very reminiscent of other dystopias as 1984, its ideas are very provactive and prophetic. Great Feminist fiction.